It is certainly common enough to speak of belief as a choice, but could I choose to believe that I was not sitting in a chair right now? (I am.) Could I choose to believe that the music playing at this moment (Sky-Fucking-Line-of-Toronto) had been recorded by The Kinks? (It was The Rugburns.) Could I choose to believe that my cat, Auto-Kitty (pictured to the left) is a Siamese? (She is of course a Tortie.)

Mind you, I am not asking if I could tell you that Auto-Kitty is a Siamese. I most certainly could. I am not asking if I could play some special word-game in approaching the subject and define ‘Siamese’ in such a manner as to include cats with a tortoise-shell coat. I am not even asking whether or not I could embark on some long-term project to convince myself that my little Auto-Kitty was really a Siamese. …though I really don’t think I could do that either. No, I am asking whether or not I could choose to believe, right here and now, that a cat I know to be something other than a Siamese was in fact (using a conventional understanding of the term) actually a Siamese?

The answer is ‘no’.

I think it is safe to say, dear reader, that we could come up with a range of similar propositions for you, claims that you could not choose to believe, at least not without a complex long-term brain-washing process to get you there. You could probably assert these claims, but you could not actually believe them.

So, there is at least one respect in which belief appears to present a limit to our choices. Somewhere in the question of what one believes, we all encounter an emergent property which is beyond the control of our immediate will. …Okay, at least the vast majority of us do.

No, it is not my intention to suggest that we have no choice at all with respect to beliefs, but rather to suggest that the choices must in some respect live with this emergent property, the one which defies our power to shape it at will. Truth be told I think we could probably put a range of different propositions on a scale of sorts. Auto-Kitty’s non-Siamese status is, for me at least at maximum (or near maximum) resistance to the whims of my personal belief. For you, perhaps, taking my word for it, there is perhaps cause for doubt about the matter, and it might be reasonable to say that one’s response to doubt involves a degree of choice.

More to the point at hand, we could perhaps find a range of propositions about subjects inherently difficult to resolve, full of ambiguity, and perhaps even loaded with more heuristic than factual value. One might get to say that he or she has a bit more choice in such matters. But I still think it is worth knowing that somewhere in our mental landscape, we normally encounter a limitation, a point of resistance to the free play of our choices.

I should add that I do think personality is another variable. Some people seem far more capable of choosing what to believe than others. I should also add that in at least one respect this is far from a virtue.

So what?

Well, what I am getting at is a trace of the larger question of Beliefs with a capital B. I don’t mean beliefs such as; What color is the chair? What kind of cat is that? or Is there too much chili paste in the chicken red curry? No, I mean questions like; Do you believe in God? How about reincarnation? karma? …The Holy Trinity? …you get the idea. Because people often speak of these beliefs as a choice.

The notion that belief in god is a choice is a particularly common fashion of speaking, and that fashion of speaking can be very misleading. It makes of belief a moral decision, and side-steps the epistemological questions about that belief in favor of arguments from consequantialism. One must, according to this approach, choose whether or not to accept or reject God, all of which actually begs the question of whether or not She actually exists.

But I don’t wish to go too far down this particular road at the moment. I am more interested in fleshing out how the issue affects self-presentation in matters of belief.

Okay, I am thinking about how this affects me!

You see, I often think back to these days of my own deconversion, and I realize that I have become accustomed to speaking of the process in unnecessarily mystical terms. I sometimes say that “I lost belief in God at around the age of 18,” or I may explain that “I chose to reject religion at that age.” Perhaps I will say that “I lost my faith,” and so on.

I don’t think this language is at all unusual, but the more I think about it the more I realize that they are not accurate descriptions of what happened at that time in my life at all. It would be far closer to the truth to say that I never really had faith at all. It would be more precise to say that I could find no aspect of my thought process which has ever answered to the concept of ‘faith’ as it is normally used in connection to belief in God.

Still further, I think it would be more accurate to say that I never really believed in God. Oh, I wanted to! As a young teen I REALLY wanted God in my life. I read. I prayed. I meditated. I studied. I did everything I could to ‘find God’ as they say, and the truth is that I just never did. I found a great deal of speech about him, but that speech never resonated with me on any personal level, nor did it point to anything in the objective world that struck me as a good candidate for a deity. When the day came that I finally came to see myself as an unbeliever, it was less a rejection of some viable notion than it was a concession that no such concept could be found in my mental landscape.

It was less a choice to reject belief than an acknowledgement of a mental state over which I did not really have a choice.

This was about the age of 18 or 19, and by that time I had come to know a number of approaches to the subject of God and religion. But these were always bracketed concepts in my own mind. They were ideas that someone else believed in, definitions of God that fit someone else’s beliefs, …or at least their claims. When I embraced my role as an unbeliever, the decision changed absolutely nothing about my beliefs. It was a change in my self-presentation, a decision about how best to describe the beliefs (or the lack thereof) that I already had.

For me at least, I could no more choose to believe in God than I could choose to believe that Auto-Kitty is a Siamese. I could say that God exists of course, but short of equivocation, I could not mean it.

I could deflect the question and say that I do not know whether or not God exists. Better yet, I could grunt and change the subject.

I could choose to put forward a variety of labels for my thoughts on the subject. So, for example, I could probably describe myself as either an ‘atheist’, an ‘agnostic’, or even an ‘agnostic atheist’. I could add the qualifiers ‘weak’ before ‘atheist’ or ‘soft’ before ‘agnostic’, or I could leave them off according to taste. Any of these approaches would be an equally accurate description of my take on the matter of God. I am somewhat inclined to believe that the label ‘non-cognitivism’ would work as well, though I would have to read-up a bit more on that approach to the issue before deciding once and for all on the label. But let us be clear, what I am choosing here is a label and a certain amount of baggage that goes with that label. What I am not choosing is what I will or won’t actually believe.

I have a little more wiggle room on the issue of surety. I could say that I am certain on the matter or that I am open to the possibility that a god does exist. The cognitive hazards of container metaphors aside, both of these could be a reasonably accurate description of my attitude on any given day. Choosing one or the other term would in a sense help to make the issue normative; it would give me an incentive to try for the attitude I had adopted as a self-description, and to avoid the other. Either way, I do feel like I have a little more choice in the degree of certainty I wish present my approach to this issue to others.

Indeed, I have lots of choices about the way I package my lack of belief and explain it to others. I also have lots of choices about what my (non-)beliefs mean to me and how they will shape my actions in the future.

What I do not have a choice about is what I actually believe on the subject. Somewhere in there, the power of choice simply escapes me.

***

Okay, I lied about what Auto-Kitty was trying to say in the title. What she was actually trying to tell you with that little meow of hers is that in the picture above, she is more comfortable than you or I or any other person in the whole of human history will ever be. She just wanted you to know that.

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39 thoughts on “Auto-Kitty Says ‘Meow': What she Means is that Belief is not a Choice”

That’s one reason why I find the argument some Christians make, which is that it’s just so easy to believe in Christ, is a bunch of hooey. No, it’s NOT easy to make yourself believe something. You can CLAIM to believe it, but actually believing it is a more difficult matter.

I think your experience matches mine, but i do wonder what is going on in those other minds. Does the experience they describe as a choice match something I would recognize by another name? Or is it possible that they really do seem to have a choice?

I also think that it has a lot to do with how honest you are with yourself about how you really feel and think. I’ve done a lot of reading up on the psychology of relationships, and how to stay a healthy, independent person within a relationship, and one of the things a lot of people (psychologists, counselors and even new-agey writers and creative thinkers) suggest is that every day you write down your thoughts and feelings in a journal, in a sort of free-form, stream-of-consciousness way. The point of this is that you find your real feelings and thoughts (and beliefs) about what is going on in your life by doing this.

I think many people, maybe most of them, push aside or sometimes deeply bury their real beliefs for reasons ranging from a busy life with no time for such ‘trivialities’ to extreme guilt induced from childhood surrounding the genuine belief. In the meantime they wonder why they feel such stress, anger, pain or depression in their lives. I wonder if sometimes diseases or psychological problems are actually manifestations of a life being lived out of alignment with one’s genuine beliefs.

I have sometimes wondered, if everyone was actually truly honest with themselves if there would even be any Christians left. It’s a religion with so many contradictions and so many illogical ideologies that anyone with an honest and intelligent mind should easily find it insane to continue believing such things. Many people do find it insane but, because of the inherent childhood-born imbedded guilt that comes with Christianity, they’ve devised their own stories alongside it in an attempt to make it work. And others refuse to even ponder it, forcing it down their own throats every day out of sheer fear of a possibility of another mode of being… it’s like they’ve brainwashed themselves.

I also think that it is precisely the discovery of the insanity of Christianity that can cause some people to seek out a new, mystical religion or spirituality to replace it, since the concept of God, especially when put in your psyche since birth, when it is thrown out can leave a gaping hole. For some it’s enough to fill this hole with hedonism or work or science. For others they want something otherworldly that requires faith. (Faith = Believing something is fact that in fact doesn’t make any sense?)

Choosing to believe I think is just as hard as choosing not to believe, matter of convictions. I “stopped” believing in god when I was about 15-16, as you said, I came to the realization that I actually never believed on god nor on most of the arguments people use whenever I would question it’s existence, several times I would leave the room saying that I agreed with them and that all my doubts had been cleared, nothing farther from the truth, if anything I was left with more doubts and questions than what I initially had, until I said “the hell with it, this just cannot be, not buying it”, of course I had to fake being a believer for awhile to avoid pointless confrontations because somehow I was comfortable with not believing but the very thought of not believing abhors the believers.
What a mess I just wrote lol.
Anyway I liked your post.

This is a good post. When I was five my Mom took me to a Mormon Sermon, or whatever you call it, and the message was that we were all hopeless sinners who would spend eternity in hell if we did not believe all these stories to be true and follow these strict guidelines. My Dad found me crying behind the couch the next day and I told him why. He said, “anybody you ask will give you a different story. You have to make your own sense of all of this”. Before then, my fear came from the fact that I was trying so hard to believe the stories were real but I could not force myself to believe. So, from my experiences, you are right. The irony was that I did believe, or maybe just feared, that the outcome would still be an eternity in hell. Do you have to believe in something to experience fear from it? It is definitely not a confirmation that it exists either way. We are led to believe different things based on what truths, partial truths and lies we consume, and we choose what we consume to some extent. Maybe we only have indirect control of our beliefs as a safeguard to keep us from venturing too far away from reality, but far enough to spark change. What we consume at least has to come from a real world, though we manifest contradictions and illusions from it and then feed it to others. I have accepted that most things are not true as we want them to be, but there is still truth in them. Even the story of Jesus, whether it happened or not, has some really powerful truths that are more important than the belief of it happening. Heck, I learned a few things from watching Rango the other day, and I know/believe that he does not exist! I just look for the point, then take it with me and keep moving. Most people do, but sometimes they get caught up in fear, social pressure and attachment. That is how we miss out on what else is out or in there.

Thank you Travis. there is a lot to unpack in your post. I think the notion that some of the more frightening notions of religious rhetoric may affect you even if you don’t literally believe. That rings true for me, and I suspect it is the key to a rather broad range of rhetorical issues I haven’t thought about carefully enough.

Very true, in the back of my mind I still consider the possibility of burning in hell for keeping an open mind. But, God I hope not. lol. The belief that is with me, without my choice, is that Heaven and Hell are just a state of mind that will manifest itself to be our reality according to which one we choose. Jesus was an example of a person who kept Heaven as a state of mind. The lesson is that it sucks to be the only one. Maybe these stories were told to be understood by common people who might not have been able to gain a sense of the magnitude in the message without metaphors they could relate to. Over time they got really really weird though. Who knows what was added or taken away over such a long period of time, especially considering the power of having followers. I am not an expert at all, just a common person with an interpretation, and that lingering fear in the back of my mind that says “what if you are wrong?” Fear spread by establishments is too often an illusion though.

I, like some of the other commenters, was taught to believe in a god, but could never actually accept the concept. That’s not to say that I didn’t want to, for as a child I was raised In a loving, church-going family where religion was a part of our life. Oh, I tried to fit in, said the words, sang the very pretty songs, and quite enjoyed the fascinating rituals of our family’s religion. But I don’t remember a time when I ever felt any belief. When I grew old enough to express this, my parents took my lack of faith as a personal failure on their part. I loved them very much, and their disappointment seemed so ridiculous and so very sad to me. Belief, or the lack of it, therefore became a private matter for me. I feel no need to convert others to my mindset, never have, so I usually only mention the fact that I am an atheist when asked, as the fact seems to upset some people. I’ve never really understood why they should care one way or the other.

I think you and I had similar experiences in the early stages at least. I too tend to be quiet about not believing among family and believing friends. where I am vocal is in public venues, largely because I am quite conscious of the political significance of religious issues.

It sounds like your deconversion experience mirrors my own to some degree, or at least my fears. I knew my mother and father would be supportive and understanding, but I also knew that my lack o belief would hurt them to some degree. So, I just kept it to myself, for the most part. I think they knew, in fact Mom clearly did. We just didn’t talk about it.

This is probably the most sincere, honest explanation for non-belief that I’ve ever read. Outstanding post. You’ve given me a whole new level of understanding of those who claim to have either walked away from belief or never had it in the first place. Thank you.

Thank you for your interesting and honest thoughts. I feel like my personal experience is quite the opposite. I can’t help but believe. I understand what you are saying and have heard many similar stories that share your experiences. However, I have also met many people whose lives with God and beliefs about God are based on experiences like yours that lead to a different end. While you couldn’t help your unbelief, myself and others couldn’t help but believe.

I think we are on the same page as to the role of choice. How to reconcile the difference in our personal narratives, well that is a touch knot to untangle. For now, I think I will just say hello and it’s very nice to meet you.

Really good post, something similar happened to me in my late teens. I used to attend chapel at school 3 times a week, pray and read the bible regularly. My inquiring mind led me to further study of the apocrypha and other ancient texts that showed me the contradictions and errancy in the bible. I had already rejected the authority of organised religion once I realised their insistance on some laws (homosexuality) over others (the golden rule).

I’ve always thought that while a person can choose to (or indeed be forced to) express a belief or act like a believer, nothing can be done to alter a person’s core beilef without brain washing or indoctrination. A person may be able to be convinced if they want to but they will need a good convincer. Equally, refusing to look at or consider other arguments is also a choice but if you look at the facts with an open mind, your conculsions are not a conscious choice.

Great post. I tend to think that faith is the thing that keeps Christians from making the same decisions. When things don’t come to a logical conclusion that is when Christians use faith to bridge the gap between reason and belief. Faith is the silver bullet to rational thought.

Looks like I’m in a minority of 1 here, but I have been a Christian for 46 years – having converted from atheism. It’s rather a sweeping statement I know but I think you’ve all been looking in the wrong place. Did any of you actually speak directly to God and ask Him to show you if He exists or not? Cults ‘brainwash’ – God does not.
I see a huge problem with your reasoning about belief in God not being a ‘choice’ in that you are confusing what you can see with your physical eyes and what you can’t. Unless people are blind, in which case somebody else would describe your cat’s appearance to them, we can all see that your cat is not a Siamese ! Choice in spiritual matters, musical tastes,style etc is however a reality. We certainly make our [hopefully informed] choices in these areas and live with the consequences of them.
Yes – it takes ‘Faith’ , but faith that is based solidly in investigated evidence and truth which has to be understood in a very personal way, not in purely emotional decisions or wishful thinking. Nobody else can ‘prove’ God’s existence to you – it is an individual choice to pursue or not because we will all ultimately stand before God as an individual with no excuses. The Bible correctly says that Faith is a gift of God. He offers it to everyone but not everyone wants it !

It’s interesting that you describe yourself as a minority of one here. It does indeed look like you are the only one expressing outright disapproval of my post, but your follow-up comment dismisses everyone who has responded to it. I’m not sure what the other believers (Kent and Joy) who have weighed in have done to merit your disrespect, but perhaps you simply didn’t notice them.

Now as to your first question (about asking God directly), the answer in my question is ‘yes’. In fact, I’ll warrant, you could have gathered that from reading my actual post. I don’t expect that will impress you, and i do realize this is a rhetorical question, but the fact is that rhetorical questions sometimes have answers. …whether they are appreciated or not is another question.

There is indeed a distinction to be made between my exhibit A (the color of my cat) and the object at hand; I must certainly concede that. Whether or not that distinction makes a difference is indeed another question. I would suggest that for you it does not. See, you are talking about speaking directly to God, not inferring his existence from a logical argument, but actually talking to him. This assumes that one can sense Him in some direct manner. He is for you every bit as obvious as the color of my cat’s coat, which suggests that in your approach to this subject my analogy is rather right on target.

Getting to the heart of the matter, you assert: “Choice in spiritual matters, musical tastes,style etc is however a reality.” Note that you do not make any effort to establish that this is true, but you do assert it. I do find the issue of musical taste interesting in itself though, so I’ll take a moment to comment on that.

1) The analogy breaks down. Liking music is not the same as believing that it exists. Likewise, liking God (or even loving Her) is not the same as believing that She exists.

2) I’m honestly not sure that I do have a choice in my aesthetic tastes. I’m going to take the liberty of switching examples and use your beautiful flower picture as an example instead. I think they are gorgeous and I enjoy looking at them a great deal. On some level that quality of appreciation eludes my choices. Or rather, it precedes them. I could choose to care about it or not. I could choose whether or not I feel like saying anything about it, whether or not I will indulge myself in the desire to look at them more. I could even choose how I weigh that in our dialogue here, etc., but could I look at this picture:

…and not find it beautiful?

I’m not sure that I can.

Which leaves us to one last point. On some level here, we have a question about how our own experiences relate to those of others. You seem to be suggesting that I (and the other unbelievers here) have been dishonest. It isn’t that we don’t believe in god; we have rejected his ‘gift’ (a development which assumes we are aware of them). I can certainly see how this fits in with your overall take on the issue, but it certainly does not match my own sense of experience. If you cannot respect that, then perhaps you should move on. Note that I do not ask you to agree with it, but I do ask you to respect it. If that is too much, then, well, this isn’t going to be a very friendly discussion.

I’m so sorry that I seem to have offended you with my views … I wasn’t intending to be rude – and yes – I must have missed reading the believers who’ve left comments. I find it ironic that you think I’m suggesting you’re being dishonest, because it appears that is the very thing you accuse believers of – with quite a bit of mockery too. It was because of that , I felt inclined to defend those of us who do believe. My comment was deliberately non- detailed regarding my own conversion as it would take up too much of the space that legitimately belongs to you. I in no way ‘disapprove ‘ of your Blog and I’m really sorry that you thought that . I was merely pointing out a flaw in your argument and putting the other side for sincere people to consider that’s all .

I hadn’t intended my comments to lead to arguments on the subject and I fear I am still causing offence, but I could equally ask where I said that you were being dishonest ? I guess we are both referring to an overall ‘impression’ that we each have or what we think each other is implying ? Wrongly it seems. In my defense I also included my reading of some of the comments when I said ‘you’. But you have to concede that your Atheist’s Prayer post is rather mocking ?
But no matter …. these are just our opinions. My motives are good ones I hope, in that the Gospel is indeed good news for those who will receive it’s message.

You chose to point out a flaw in my argument, as you said before, but now you tell me you didn’t intend to create an argument?

Honestly, I think that’s part of the problem; you really aren’t sure what you mean to do here, so you are all over the place. An argument isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but things tend to go South if you’re not prepared for a response.

You could indeed ask where you said I was being dishonest, and the answer to that question would be in my first response.

My prayer-post could be described as mocking yes. It is a sarcastic response to a common description of atheism. The object of the sarcasm is very specific, and it id NOT a general lambasting of bleif. So, NO, it does not constitute a description of belief in God as dishonest, much less does it constitute mockery of belief in God. Nor does anything about your impression of THAT POST explain anything about why would choose to raise the issue in THIS POST. Unless of course indirection is your accustomed mode of communication.

And NO, I do not accept responsibility for what other people say. Your decision to include the statements of others as part of the rationale for your criticism of my posts is disingenuous in the extreme.

As to your sweeping metanarrative about how we are both referring to an overall impression, well please speak for yourself. I for one have addressed a number of specifics in my posts; you have not. So, if you want to go with the grand shoulder shrug and bow out that would be fine withe me. This discussion is a complete dead-end.

Hmmm – are you always so scathing to those who disagree with you ? Your self righteousness is rather daunting to me and I’m no match for that.
However , regarding talking to God – it depends what ‘stage’ in your mind you are I guess. If you are at the stage of agnosticism then it would be quite a logical thing to do if you’re keen on ‘knowing’ the truth. That is indeed what happened to me as I went from utter atheism to being an agnostic. This was partly because I began to see the eveidence of changed lives – which they claimed was the result of belief in God and I had no real answer to it. Many things happened to me that I would explain away as coincidences until there came a specific incident that overcame my stubborness.
No – I’m not prepared to pick up on all your points as I know it will make no difference to you whatsoever and why would I want to subject myself to further antagonism when I’ve tried to be friendly throughout ? [ That doesn’t mean that I don’t have answers though].
I’ll take the hint – I know where I’m not wanted !!

I myself have been an atheist since I was 12-13, but it’s difficult to talk about in the terms of “became an atheist” because, while I hadn’t been an atheist prior to that, I still hadn’t really believed in a god. It’s more a matter of, at that time, the concepts of God and religion solidified in my mind, and so it also became very clear that I did not have faith.

My brother always used to try and convince me that I should believe in God or religion or whatever because if religion is true it’s the only way I’ll go to heaven and if I’m right (as if it’s either the Christian faith or atheism alone) we’ll all be screwed. But I couldn’t do that, mostly because no matter how much I said I was religious just at an attempt to save myself, it would never be true, and wouldn’t an omnipotent God be able to understand I had been lying?

It seems quite common that people think you can just go through the motions of believing in God and still end up being rewarded. That’s basically what Pascal’s Wager says, certainly. If there is a God, wouldn’t he be too smart to fall for that?

I failsomely attempted commenting on this last night, when I somehow closed the browser and the comment was unretrievable. Yes! I agree with you on your definition of belief. There is a causal aspect to it. The word ‘believe’ itself doesn’t allow for anything else in English. If you look it up in a good dictionary, you’ll find it’s a verb in the stative sense, so that means it refers to a state you’re in rather than an action you’re doing. Statives cannot be imperatives. You can say, “Allan believes my story”, but you’re pushing Allan a little far if you ask him to believe your story. On the other hand, the word is not as exclusive as that. It also denotes trust. And you can see that when you suffix the pronoun, “in”. Obviously, if you “believe in” Santa Claus then that’s a fact possibly relying on what your parents told you. However, if “Allan believes in me” as opposed to “Allan believes me”, or if I “believe in” love then there are some deeper meanings at work here — your belief is not purely intellectual but one of trust, even willingness to believe against the bare facts and experiences. Someone who had a rough rollercoaster ride through hurtful relationships may still resolutely decide to believe in love.

I think popular Christian/empirical thought has eschewed this a little. What never mattered regarding faith was involuntary intellectual conclusions. Maybe it matters a little but primary is trust based on hope. I think that’s faith. I suppose trust has a causal element to it too. Still trying to figure that one out…

I have been a Christian since age 12 and, yes, some days it is even difficult for a Christian to believe when we can’t feel the presence of God. My experience has always been it is because I have shut Him out.

No matter what your belief, I love you as a fellow human and wish you the best.

Holy crap (ha ha), I feel like I hit the lottery finding your blog. Beautiful post. Can’t say I agree more. I went to Catholic school for 8 years and they did their best to brainwash me but it didn’t take. At 55 I still bear some residue but it’s words like yours than help to resolve it. Love the term “bracketed concepts”. Thanks for your work.

Beautiful post, Daniel…what a nice to wake-up to on a Saturday morning…. Was referred by a friend. Haven’t had time yet to browse all the comments or the rest of the blog, but this article resonates deeply…echoes some/most of my own sentiment on the subject. After years of alternating serious and half-serious struggle with what to call myself, I’ve found that I just don’t believe there are any gods at all, so it’s no longer whether I’m an agnostic or an atheist…non-deist seems to fit somehow…I think it might even minimize the argument. Anyway, thank you for sharing as you have. I’ll be back to visit more and delve a little deeper into your readers’ comments. Take care…Scott.